Moving Beyond Pretense: Nuclear Power and Nonproliferation

The U.S. President and nearly all his critics agree that the spread of nuclear weapons and the possibility of their seizure and potential use is the greatest danger facing the United States and the world. Looking at the way government and industry officials downplay the risks of civilian nuclear technology and materials being diverted to make bombs, one would get almost the opposite impression.

Most governments have made the promotion of nuclear power's growth and global development a top priority. Throughout, they have insisted that the dangers of nuclear weapons proliferation are manageable either by making future nuclear plants more "proliferation-resistant" or by strengthening International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards and acquiring more timely intelligence on proliferators. How sound is this view? How useful might civilian nuclear programs be for states that want to get nuclear weapons quickly? Are current International Atomic Energy Agency nuclear safeguards sufficient to block military nuclear diversions from civilian programs? Are there easy fixes to upgrade these controls? How much can we count on more timely intelligence on proliferators to stem the further spread of nuclear weapons?

This volume taps the insights and analyses of 13 top security and nuclear experts to get the answers. What emerges is a comprehensive counternarrative to the prevailing wisdom, and a series of innovative reforms to tighten existing nuclear nonproliferation controls.

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

HENRY SOKOLSKI, Editor, is Executive Director of the Non-proliferation Policy Education Center in Arlington, VA, and adjunct professor at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, DC. He previously served as a military legislative aide and special assistant for nuclear energy affairs in the U.S. Senate, as Deputy for Nonproliferation Policy in the Pentagon, and as a member of the Central Intelligence Agency's Senior Advisory Group. Mr. Sokolski also was appointed by Congress to serve on the Deutch Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Commission and the Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism and has authored and edited numerous books on proliferation, including Best of Intentions: America's Campaign against Strategic Weapons Proliferation.

RICHARD CLEARY is a student at Columbia Law School, where he is a Kent Scholar and an editor of the Columbia Law Review. In 2013, he was named the Charles L. Brieant Jr. fellow in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Prior to law school, Mr. Cleary was a research assistant in the Mar-ilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). He has interned for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and in the personal office of Senator Richard Lugar. Mr. Cleary holds a B.A., summa cum laude, from Washington and Lee Uni-versity and an M.Phil. in international relations from Trinity College, University of Cambridge. His M.Phil. dissertation examined the influence of Mohamed El-Baradei as Director General of the International Atom-ic Energy Agency (IAEA) on the Iraq and Iran cases, and his undergraduate thesis considered the use of civilian nuclear energy in French diplomacy.

MATTHEW FUHRMANN is an assistant professor of political science at Texas A&M University. He is a former Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and research fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. Dr. Fuhrmann is the author of Atomic Assistance: How "Atoms for Peace" Programs Cause Nuclear Instability. His research has been published in a number of journals, including the American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Inter-national Organization, International Security, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, and Journal of Politics, among others. He has published opinion pieces in outlets such as the Christian Science Monitor, Slate, and USA Today.

VICTOR GILINSKY is an independent consultant on matters primarily related to nuclear energy. He was a two-term commissioner of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission from 1975-84, and before that Head of the Rand Corporation Physical Sciences Department. He is a member of the American Physical Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Dr. Gilinsky holds a bachelor's of engineering physics degree from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in physics from the California Institute of Technology, where he received the Distinguished Alumni Award.

PIERRE GOLDSCHMIDT is a nonresident senior as-sociate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. From 1999 to 2005, he was deputy Director General and head of the Department of Safeguards at the IAEA. Before joining the IAEA, Dr. Goldschmidt was director general of SYNATOM, which manages the fuel supply and spent fuel of Belgian nuclear plants and was a member of the directory of the French uranium-enrichment company EURODIF. He is also a member of the European Nuclear Society's High Sci-entific Council and has headed numerous European and international committees on nuclear energy. He is the author of over 100 publications and has received a number of cultural and scientific awards, including the 2008 Joseph A. Burton Forum Award of the American Physical Society. He was nominated Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor and was knighted by the King of Belgium.

OLLI HEINONEN is a Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. Dr. Heinonen served 27 years at the IAEA, where he was the Deputy Director General and head of the Department of Safeguards, director of various operational divisions, and an inspector. His assignments included leading teams of investigators to examine nuclear programs of concern around the world, leading the Agency's efforts to identify and dismantle proliferation networks, and overseeing ef-forts to monitor and contain Iran's nuclear program. Prior to joining the IAEA, Dr. Heinonen was a senior research officer at the Technical Center of Finland's Reactor Laboratory and co-authored patents on radio-active waste solidification. He is the author of several articles, books, chapters of books, various IAEA publications, and has been published in numerous scholarly and popular periodicals around the world.

FRANCOIS HEISBOURG is Chairman of the Council of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy and of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). He is a special advisor at the Paris-based Fondation pour la Recherche Strategique. He has also sat on a number of national and international blue-ribbon bodies, including the French Defence and National Security White Paper, the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, the International Commission on the Bal-kans, and the European Union Commission's group of personalities on security research and development. Mr. Heisbourg has written extensively on defense and security issues and is a frequent contributor to both specialist and mainstream media on such matters.

GREGORY S. JONES is a senior researcher at the Non-proliferation Policy Education Center in Arlington, VA, and an adjunct staff member at the RAND Corporation. Mr. Jones has been a defense policy analyst for the last 40 years. A major emphasis of his work has been on the study of the potential for terrorists and hostile countries to acquire and use nuclear, chemical, biological, and radiological weapons, and the formulation of policies and actions to control and counter these weapons. Since 2008, Mr. Jones has analyzed Iran's centrifuge uranium enrichment program and charted Iran's inexorable movement towards a nuclear weapons capability.

R. SCOTT KEMP is an assistant professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a research scholar with the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton Univer-sity, and an affiliate of Harvard University's Program on Managing the Atom. From 2010-11, he served as Science Advisor in the Office of the Special Advisor to the Secretary for Nonproliferation and Arms Control where he was the State Department's resident centrifuge expert and was responsible for developing packages for negotiating with Iran. Dr. Kemp is also a member of the American Physical Society's Panel on Public Affairs. His work has been used in studies by the National Academies of Sciences, the American Physical Society, and the JASON advisory group. Prior to coming to Princeton, Dr. Kemp was a Fulbright Fellow in London and a member of the research staff at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

MATTHEW KROENIG is an associate professor of government and foreign service and international relations field chair at Georgetown University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at the Atlantic Council. From July 2010 to July 2011, he was a Special Advisor in the Office of the Secretary of Defense on a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellowship; and he worked as a strategist in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in 2005. Dr. Kroenig has held fellowships from the Council on Foreign Relations, the National Science Foundation, the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, and the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California. He is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

PATRICK S. ROBERTS is an associate professor in the Center for Public Administration and Policy in the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech in Alexandria, Virginia. He is the Associate Chair and Program Director CPAP, Northern Virginia. He holds a Ph.D. in government from the University of Virginia, and he spent 2 years as a post-doctoral fel-low, one at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and another at the Program for Constitutional Government at Harvard University. He spent 2010-11 as the Ghaemian Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Heidelberg's Center for American Studies in Germany. Mr. Roberts is the author of Disasters and the American State: How Politicians, Bureaucrats, and the Public Prepare for the Unexpected (Cambridge, 2013).

SUSAN VOSS is the President and co-founder of the Global Nuclear Network Analysis, LLC, a small, woman-owned engineering firm in Los Alamos, NM. She was previously employed at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), where she worked on projects re-lated to nuclear power, the nuclear fuel cycle, nuclear nonproliferation, counterproliferation, and arms con-trols for the Departments of State, Energy, Defense, and Homeland Security. Prior to her career at LANL, she worked for the Air Force Weapons Laboratory in Albuquerque on space nuclear power. Ms. Voss is currently a consultant to the Hyperion Power Generation Company's small nuclear reactor design team, focusing on advanced nuclear fuel design and safety. She holds a master's in nuclear engineering from the University of New Mexico.
LEONARD WEISS is an affiliated scholar at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and a national advisory board member of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, DC. He worked for over 2 decades for Senator John Glenn as the staff director of both the Senate Subcommittee on Energy and Nuclear Proliferation and the Committee on Governmental Affairs. He was the chief architect of the Nuclear Nonprolif-eration Act of 1978 and led investigations of the In-dian and Pakistani nuclear programs. Dr. Weiss has published numerous articles for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Arms Control Today, and The Nonproliferation Review. He holds tenured professorships at Brown University and the University of Maryland.

ROBERT ZARATE is policy director at the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) in Washington, DC. Before joining FPI, he served as legislative assistant for foreign affairs to U.S. Representative Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE) and as a legislative fellow for the majority staff in the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade. He was previously a research scholar at the Nonproliferation Policy Educa-tion Center, an independent consultant on nuclear is-sues, a reporter for Wired News, and a policy analyst at Steptoe & Johnson LLP. He also served on the Project on Nuclear Initiatives Working Group on U.S.-China Nuclear Issues convened by the Center for Security and International Studies. Mr. Zarate co-edited Nuclear Heuristics: Selected Writings of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter and has published essays and articles in periodicals such as Time, The Weekly Standard, National Review, and U.S. News and World Report.